My heart sank.  “Have you seen Tattletale?  Have you heard if she’s dead or injured?  She wears a lavender and black costume, and there’s this eye in dark gray on the black part across her chest-”

I’m sure this was helpful for fan artists. I know her outfit has been described before, but I don’t think it was quite this clear.

Then again, I’m not good at remembering outfit descriptions.

“I’m sorry,” she hurried to the foot of the bed, hung up the clipboard.

I’m sorry?  Was that an answer – condolences – or was it a refusal to speak on the subject?

I think it might’ve been both. The most she can say without technically overstepping her boundaries further, while simultaneously apologizing for not being able to say more.

I might have made a noise, because she turned back, stopped.  I couldn’t be sure, though, over the sounds from the other nurses, doctors and patients.

“We’ve got a code!” someone screamed, just beyond the curtain.  “Need paddles!”

“Paddles are in use!”

Well, shit. I guess we’re about to get clarification on what exactly coding means in this context. It sounds like it’s the “code red” option so far.

“Then get me someone with electricity powers!  And you, resuscitate!”

Heh, nice thinking.

Seriously, rogues and how society handles having them can sometimes be more interesting than capes.

In this case, the electricity powers don’t necessarily need to be from a rogue – there are plenty of capes here, even if most are beaten half to death – but I’m thinking about the potential use of rogues in hospitals under more normal conditions.

“Yes, some heroes got hurt badly enough they wouldn’t recover, they knew they had no more income from their costume career, so suing, it was a way-” she stopped, closed her mouth deliberately, as if reminding herself to stay silent.

A way to stay afloat on the restitution money.

But what does talking to the patients have to do with that, anyway?

“You can’t tell me if my back’s broken or not?”

She shook her head, “No.”

That’s… kind of dumb, honestly.

“I won’t tell.  I won’t sue.”

“Saying that isn’t legally binding,” she frowned, again, “and It- it’s not that.  I’m just a nursing student.  I haven’t even graduated.

Nice, we’ve got her talking about herself now.

They recruited us to help meet demand, to do the paperwork and check that patients weren’t coding, so the people with experience could focus on handling the patient load.

Coding? As in trying to communicate with each other via code? Or as in “code red” and such, maybe?

I don’t have the training to diagnose you on any level, let alone your back.”

That’s fair.

Might as well look up Hadhayosh too while I’m at it.

Alright, so we’re looking at Persian mythology, much like the origin of “the Simurgh”. Maybe this nurse is from Iran, and/or just wants to be consistent by calling all of the Endbringers by names from the same culture.

Palestinian is also an option. It would make sense for a Palestinian person to not want to use the apparently Jewish names Behemoth and Leviathan.

And much like the Behemoth in the illustration for the Ziz, it’s specifically a land creature. I guess maybe Wormverse Behemoth/Hadhayosh could be a combined fire/earth type? At the very least, he’ll be a land-based fire type.

This description also fits the illustration. There’s a good chance these were different cultures describing the same mythological beings with different names, just like in the present Wormverse.

It also makes it much more likely that Behemoth will have horns.

“That’s one of the other names for Behemoth.  Like Ziz is for the Simurgh?”

Ohh, I see. Hadhayosh wasn’t the cape.

…so Behemoth used to have hayosh, then?

Alright, jokes aside, I guess the significance of this is that the nurse may come from a different culture, and the fact that there are different names for the Endbringers. Makes a lot of sense, that, given that the Endbringer we’ve seen wasn’t capable of naming himself.

Actually, I suppose he could

blink it in morse code (does he have eyelids?). Or write it in the sand or spell it out with water like Taylor with her bugs at the gallery. Or with the bodies of the slain, or sign language… Point is, if he wanted to and knew how to write an alphabet – unlikely – he’d have ways even if he doesn’t have a mouth.

Why was sign language the last thing I thought of there?

Anyway, point is none of the Endbringers are likely to provide their own names for themselves, so people have to make up their own, and the Americans aren’t the only ones who have to deal with these fuckers.

Also, while I’m not familiar with Hadhayosh, Ziz sounds familiar. I think that’s an Egyptian or Mesopotamian god, but I’m not sure.

Alright, I got the what and the where somewhat wrong, but at least I was in the right general area.

The Ziz being a giant bird isn’t terribly surprising, what with the Simurgh also being a bird and the mounting evidence of the Endbringers having elemental affiliations.

Incidentally, I really like that Ziz happens to appear together with Behemoth and Leviathan in the illustration. Or, well, I say “happens to”, but I really don’t think that’s a coincidence. The fact that these three appear together in one place and form an elemental triad (though Behemoth here seems to be earth rather than fire, unless those are fireballs on the left edge of the image) leads me to suspect that they were considered a set historically just like they are in Worm. That’s the kind of thing I think Wildbow would know or find out while researching and then base himself on.

Hadhayosh, huh?

Power: Having hayosh. What’s hayosh? Fuck if I know.

Hadhayosh used to be Havehayosh, but the battle the nurse just mentioned caused them to lose the hayosh.

“I have a dad.  Love him to death, even if we haven’t talked lately.  I love reading, my- my mom taught me to love books from the time I was little.  My best friend, it wasn’t so long ago that she helped pull me out of a dark place.  I haven’t heard how she’s doing.  If she’s dead or if she’s here too.  Have you seen her?  Her name’s Tattletale.”

Oh man, Taylor is pulling out all the stops here.

Also, I love that Taylor is finally explicitly saying that Tattle is – was – her best friend. It’s how I’ve thought of her for quite some time now, and it’s good to get confirmation that Taylor does too.

“We aren’t supposed to talk to the patients.”

The patients? Or the villains?

“Why not?”

“While back, some cape sued the rescue workers after a battle much like this.  Hadhayosh, I think.”

Oh, huh, there’s an actual reason behind it?

Well, at least you’ve got her doing the exact thing she’s telling you why she shouldn’t do.

She ignored me, turned her attention to the heart monitor, made a note on the clipboard.

“Please talk to me,” I spoke.  “I have no idea what’s going on, and I feel like I’m losing my mind, here.”

This kind of openness might work, I suppose.

The nurse doesn’t seem all that comfortable with being in here either. This might help put her at ease a bit.

She glanced at me, looked away hurriedly the same reflexive way you’d pull away from a hot stove with your hand.

“Please?  I’m-  I’m pretty scared right now.”

I don’t think this nurse wants to be this impersonal, but has been told to.

Nothing.  She took more notes on the clipboard, noting stuff from the screen the electrode ran to.

“I know you think I’m bad, a villain, but I’m a person, too.”

Ooh, that’s a pretty good one. If nothing else did, this might get through to her a little.

She glanced at me again, looked away, returned her eyes to the clipboard and frowned.  She stopped writing as she glanced up to the monitor, as if she had to find her place or double check her numbers.

We’re not quite there yet, but progress seems to be being made.

To be clear, I was at least half-joking with the comment about Wildbow being a male author potentially being a part of the reason Taylor describes girls/women in terms of attractiveness or bust size. I think Wildbow is the kind of writer who’d stay away from doing that kind of thing without a legitimate reason (and he has at least one in this case).

Slander was not what I intended with that comment.

The chain of my manacle clinked taut as I yanked my right hand forward angrily.  The pain that caused me in my midsection stopped me from doing it again.

Ow.

A girl in a nurse’s uniform pushed the curtain aside to enter.  I identified her as a girl rather than a woman because she barely looked older than me.

If not for the fact that Taylor knows how she looks both in and out of costume and would probably identify her as such immediately, I’d suspect this of being Panacea.

Oh, and the pointlessness of Panacea changing into a nurse’s uniform.

Bigger in the chest, for sure, but baby faced, petite.

…it really does seem like the chest and/or general attractiveness tend to be the first things Taylor looks to when describing girls/women.

As a third theory for why that is, on top of “Taylor’s own insecurities with her appearance leads her to immediately compare other women favorably to herself” and “Taylor is bi”… I’m acutely aware that this is written by a male author. 😉

Her brown hair was in a braid, and the lashes of her downcast eyes were long as she stepped to the foot of my bed, picked up a clipboard.  She was very carefully not looking my way.

“Hi,” I spoke.

What has the PRT been telling her, I wonder?

I had suspicions they might come even years after I left high school behind me for good. 

Not unlikely.

I hear a lot of people still have school nightmares well into adulthood, and that’s in many cases without regular traumatic experiences.

But that state of mind in the nightmares?  I felt like that now.  Trying to keep from panicking, knowing that no matter what I did, I was counting on luck and forces beyond my control to not ruin my day, my week, my month.  Ruin my life.

Yeah, uncertainty and helplessness are shitty feelings.

I’d done the heroic thing.  Drawn Leviathan away from those in the shelter who were still alive.  A part of me was proud of myself.  The rest of me?  Faced with the idea of spending the rest of my life in a wheelchair?  I felt like an idiot of epic proportions.

At least the sacrifice of the use of your legs wouldn’t be in vain.

I’d bought into the idea of the grand, noble gesture, and in the here and now it felt like I had to convince myself that what I had done mattered.  It sure as shit didn’t seem to matter to anyone else.

Maybe not to the PRT, at least.